


zephyros

by Askance



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M, Mark of Cain
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-20
Updated: 2015-03-20
Packaged: 2018-03-18 17:06:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3577266
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean turns his heels west, where the glow is dimmer and the stars are trying to show. It's the edge of the property where the smooth earth gives way to trees and animal paths. <i>Yes</i>, he thinks, and walks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	zephyros

To see Sam sleep is a beautiful thing. Sometimes it's the only moment of real peace Dean has in a day. Watching the frown lines, the laugh lines, the scream lines, the crow's feet, the furrowed brows smooth out like the surface of a pond after a stone is thrown in. When he is lying on his side—as he is now, trapping Dean's arm against the bed beneath his ribs and the soft indent of his body—his hair tends to fall in silent lengths over his eyes, and move very gently with his breathing. He keeps his hands curled up near his face, near the pillow, like palms that have slipped from prayer.

 

It's how Dean falls asleep, when he's lucky. Slip-sliding into blank dreams, and his last sight the sight of Sam, asleep, tucked into him the way he's tucked into him ever since he was a child. Part of it's comfort; part of it's the vague hope that if he dies before he wakes up in the morning he'll die with Sam on his mind.

 

It's been two hours since Sam drifted off, three since they came down gasping on each other like wild naked animals, and Dean isn't tired at all, and that's a problem. He knows he's not doing a very good job of hiding his insomnia from his brother. Sam's smart enough to know when he's faking with his eyes closed. It's right around these hours that the Mark starts to get restless, and it's the worst feeling in the world. Like a huge mosquito bite. All hot and throbbing in the crook of his arm like it's got a heartbeat of its own. The weight of Sam's body on it right now is soothing, but not enough, and Dean has this feeling that if he doesn't move in some way soon he's going to end up kicking Sam awake.

 

He reaches over his chest, gently grips Sam's shoulder and pushes him, just enough to settle him onto his back. He pulls his arm out from under his brother's spine and wriggles upright, against the headboard, and presses his thumb to the hot itch of the Mark.

 

Sam sighs in his sleep, and Dean watches him rearrange himself, legs falling open under the sheets, head drifting sideways. One more sigh and then he goes still, one hand still relaxed beside his head.

 

Dean gets up.

 

The clothes he picks up from the floor may or may not be his. He almost hopes they aren't. He isn't sure why Sam's clothes come out of the washers at the Lebanon laundromat softer and smelling better than his, time after time, but he's not complaining.

 

He leaves the door open a crack. Leans against the doorframe for a minute with his arms full of fabric looking in at the single stripe of light cutting over Sam's closed right eye and then turns and shuffles down the hall in his bare feet.

* * *

 

The lights in the shower room are blinding, and once he's in he isn't sure what he's doing. The sweat of sex has cooled on his skin and a hot shower just sounds irritating. He fumbles the boxers—his—and the jeans—Sam's—from the mess of clothes and drops the rest on the floor. Stands in front of the one full-length mirror at the end of the humid row of shower stalls to put them on. Tries to ignore the flare of angry red on his arm every time it sweeps up in front of his eyes.

 

He's thinner than usual and not sure what to make of it. Not thin enough to make Sam worry, but enough that he notices.

 

A soft urge comes spiralling up from the crook of his elbow into his brain and he almost says it aloud before he catches himself. Instead he feels it playing in the corners of his eyes: _what are you doing?_

 

The shower room is the one room in the bunker with what might be called windows—strips of reinforced glass, high up near the ceiling, no thicker than Dean's forearm. They're rectangles of night blackness and reflected shuttered light and suddenly the bunker in all its magnitude feels horrifically small, as if it's withering under his bare feet, shrinking and collapsing and staying perfectly still. His arm twitches; he steps back hard away from the mirror.

* * *

 

It's barely one AM when Dean leaves the bunker, but it feels as if the night has been hanging in the sky for years. It's a skin stretched over space and he's startled, weirdly, by its bigness, disturbed by the glowing underbelly cast on it by the lights of the city.

 

He turns his heels west, where the glow is dimmer and the stars are trying to show. It's the edge of the property where the smooth earth gives way to trees and animal paths.  _Yes,_ he thinks, and walks.

* * *

 

Dean walks for an hour in the crunching underbrush before he starts to panic, and the ugly restlessness in him starts calling for random movement—he shakes his hands out to the side before stuffing them back into his jacket pockets. Kicks out at twigs and rocks and is only momentarily satisfied by their clatter. The bunker is two miles at his back and he doesn't want to turn around but his brain is muttering with increasing frenzy that he needs a reason if he's going to keep walking. 

 

_Okay,_ he says to himself, repressing the urge to speak aloud,  _okay, I'm gonna walk until I can't walk anymore._ It's not a reason, but at two in the morning it makes a kind of sense. Maybe if he walks a thousand miles he'll starve the itch in his arm and the throb will stop throbbing, and then he can lie down in the desert and die—

 

Dean finds the moon caught way up in the branches of the trees and follows it. A bare fingernail of a moon, sharp and angry. It makes sense.

* * *

 

His legs are aching by the time he reaches the end of the trees, where they peter out at a ditch that rises up to the highway, but he climbs the ditch even though his thighs are burning, grabbing at handfuls of dirt to pull himself up like a child climbing stairs on all fours. When he gets to the top the prairie breeze hits him full in the face and he stands, arms out to the side, drinking it, on the edge of the road.

 

He stands like that until a late-night driver whips past him in a flash of headlights and then he lands back in his head, and the awful feeling in his arm starts up again. Dean watches the car's red lights as they skid down the highway, flat as anything for miles and miles, until they are two glowing pinpoint eyes in the far distance. It's going north. Across the four lanes is a cornfield, black monotonous stalks arrayed against the sky like paper cutouts. Above them, the sick moon, kind of greenish, now that he looks at it in the clearness. The Mark says  _go._ He goes to it.

* * *

 

Maybe he will sweat it off. Maybe it will come detached and slide off his arm like a bad temporary tattoo. Or wear off in ugly flakes of dead evil skin.

 

He keeps the moon low in the sky ahead of him though the cornfield seems to want to lead him every which way. It's slow going. He wishes these were steadier boots. Underneath them the dead foliage of a thousand crops before this one is crackling, sinking, rotting. 

 

He's tempted to lie down in it. He must have walked five, six miles by now. Hardly anything, but his body is exhausted.

 

But if he keeps walking he'll walk straight into the big nighttime even when the sun is rising at his back and if he's lucky he'll never have to deal with the approaching day at all. He can exist for a long long time in his aching muscles and the upside-down sickle in the sky.

* * *

 

Where the cornfield ends there is a road pointed due west, so he follows it. He only makes it out in the dark by the feeling of grass and husk giving way to steady asphalt. Stuffs his hands back in his pockets. They are full of cornsilk. He lets the wind strip it out of his fingers as he goes.

* * *

 

The Mark is irritated by the constant shift of his jacket against his arm. He rolls up the sleeve to let the breeze cool it but it doesn't help, nothing helps, he'll walk into the ocean and it still won't help.

 

His legs are on auto-pilot now. Couldn't stop even if he wanted to. Dean digs his fingernails into the broad side of the Mark and tries to imagine peeling it up, off, and away. For some reason all he can think of is Sam's sleeping face and his soft curled-up hands, sweetest goddamn thing he's ever seen. He should go back. He isn't even sure where  _back_ is. And the sky is so big.

 

He doesn't have his watch on him but the moon is going rapidly down into the pit of the sky and he can feel the very first tendrils of grey daylight at his heels. He thinks of walking through the heat of the day and into the evening and into the night again. He thinks of walking all the way to the coast and right into the sea. Right along the bottom of the sea to the first Pacific islands. Up and over them. Fish flying above his head like birds. He'll sprout gills if he has to. Feed himself to the weird things in the trenches. Anything to make this throbbing stop.

* * *

 

When dawn comes he doesn't pause to think of how far he's gone. He sheds his jacket and leaves it on the side of the road. Lifts his hand from his arm and there are four tiny moons carved into the skin at the edge of the Mark where his fingernails have been for hours. A blue vein in his elbow lifted; the Mark the colour of blood. 

 

Cars begin to fill the road, first one then six then ten, all whirring by with the same noise, over and over. Dean closes his eyes as he walks to listen to them. One foot in front of the other going blind along the highway. No one stops him. All of them leave him behind.

* * *

 

It's hard to understand the size of the prairie from the inside of a car—speeding through, brains full of everything but the scenery. Dean stretches out his arms like a kid playing airplanes and imagines them reaching all the way to the edge of the earth on either side. From his vantage point they seem stunted, useless. The burn, the itch is working its way up his arm like a rash.

 

He amends his decision in his brain, murmuring it to himself like a mantra. Realises he hasn't blinked in a while and does so.  _Gonna keep walking until my feet wear out. Gonna keep walking 'til they're down to the bone. 'Til I'm bleeding. 'Til I'm—_

 

Halfway across the world, watching hawks fly over Tibet. Boots full of bones and raw gristle. When Sam was young enough to hear fairy tales still Dean told him about the evil Queen who danced to death in her red-hot shoes.

* * *

 

The sun is nearly overhead and he hates it and he's coming to trees again, thank God, when a sound emerges slowly, peeling like a scab, out of the dwindling traffic at his left, an engine rumble he'd know anywhere in the universe.

 

Three miles ago the road split off—highway going south, county road still west. He picked the county road. He's sweating through his T-shirt though the day is cool. He keeps walking even as the Impala slows beside him to a roaring crawl.

 

In the corner of his eye he can see Sam leaning across the seat to roll down the passenger window.

 

“Dean,” he calls, over the engine's puttering. “Dean.”

 

Dean looks straight ahead, thinking desperately of what to say. He licks his chapped lips. Almost to the trees, blessed shade.

 

“Dean,” Sam says, “stop.”

 

Dean shakes his head. His pace doesn't change. He's gonna walk until his tendons snap and his knees give out and then he'll crawl, maybe, on his hands and elbows.

 

The Impala matches him, for a few minutes. He can feel Sam watching him from inside. Then it startles him when the engine guns and Sam speeds forward, a hundred, two hundred feet, and swings off the road into the gravel, a shining black mass right across his path.

 

Dean swallows and doesn't stop.

 

His gut is clenching, contracting. Sam gets out of the car and comes around and stands in front of it.

 

Dean is sure that when he reaches the car he'll swerve down into the grass and around and keep going, that it's all his body will let him do. 

 

He stops in the gravel a foot away from Sam, the toes of their boots pointed at one another, and is surprised by it.

 

Dean looks at those boots. Sam's favourite pair, busted and broken in. His feet have worn them down in the inside edge. His feet lean inward, ruin all his shoes, Dad used to pitch a fit about it, said it was terrible for his bones—

 

“Hey,” Sam says.

 

Dean looks up at him; blinks.

 

“Hey.”

 

Sam shifts his weight onto his other leg, squinting a little in the high sun.

 

“Wanna tell me what this is all about?”

 

The Mark is throbbing,  _walk, walk._ Dean's brain is thinking that he'd like nothing better than to go completely weak and curl up under the warm weight of Sam's arm like a baby bird for a few hours, days, years. 

 

“I don't know,” he says, which is the truth.

 

Sam doesn't say anything, just looks at him for a while; then he turns a little, pulls himself up onto the Impala's hood, looks up north, past the trajectory of the sun, over the fields no one's sowed yet.

 

Dean crunches through the gravel and pulls himself up beside him.

 

There isn't anything to say, so they don't say anything. Dean listens to the very soft sound of the wind pushing Sam's hair against his face and closes his eyes.

 

A few moments later he feels fingers on his hot, itching arm, and opens his eyes to watch while Sam pulls it into his lap, runs his fingertips over the raised scar of the Mark, the little crescent moon shapes of Dean's nails that are beginning to blacken into bruises. He feels him flinch at the feeling of the weird self-contained heartbeat inside the thing, the way it seems to pulse like something alive.

 

Then Sam replaces it—lays it back down on Dean's thigh. Rubs his own knees and sighs and straightens his back a little, lets it relax again.

 

“We should head back,” he says, softly, without judgment. “You've gotta be dehydrated.”

 

“I can't,” Dean says. His throat must be dry as sandpaper, the way the words crack. He pictures blood welling in split skin. “I've—”

 

“What?”

 

Dean looks away, towards the trees he didn't manage to reach. Cool blue shadows rustling over the road, like they're leaning down just to let their leaves touch the faces of passersby. 

 

“Let's go home,” Sam says, “and figure this out.”

 

“Figure what out?”

 

“I don't know. But let you rest.”

 

“I don't need to rest.”

 

“What do you need?”

 

Dean looks back at him. The wind is making his face open and soft, hair blown back, all the frown, laugh, scream lines back in it, and that worry in the bow of his mouth. 

 

“I just need to walk a little further,” Dean says.

 

Sam doesn't say anything. Just watches.

 

“Okay?”

 

Sam pulls in his lower lip, lets it back out again. For an instant the pressure washes it white before the pink floods back in again. Blood, blood. Dean's arm twitches, but without conviction.

 

“Okay,” Sam says.

 

Dean slides off the hood of the Impala, pauses in the gravel, turns his face west. 

 

He begins to walk toward the trees, knowing that when he gets there he will stand in their shade and let the leaves touch his face, and he won't walk into the ocean, or to the islands, or Tibet, and he won't lie down in the desert and die. He won't dance himself to death in red-hot shoes and he won't wear his feet down to the bone. He'll go home with Sam and crawl into bed and Sam will be there with him if he needs him, and he'll leave if he doesn't, and there will be that stripe of light from the hallway, and soft curled hands, and maybe a little less panic, a little less fear.

 

Behind him, he hears boots in the gravel, just a little ways away, and doesn't have to look back to know Sam's matching him step for step towards the trees and the west and the good things and the bad things, hands in his pockets, watching.

 

 

 

 


End file.
